Tag: Edmonton Oilers

It’s never nice to be proven wrong, but whenever it comes to me writing down opinion or prediction I’m used to it. I do Mock Drafts ahead of the NHL Draft each year and I’d hate to see my accuracy record on that. I’ve predicted every first overall pick (this year I’m 100% sure I’ll be wrong) but outside of that I’m usually quite a bit off with some picks.

And I was wrong again with an article I wrote a little over a year ago. During the 2016 Stanley Cup Playoffs the NHL Draft Lottery took place and the Toronto Maple Leafs retained the first overall pick.

The article I wrote in response was titled “Winning the draft lottery won’t speed up the Leafs rebuild”

In the latest edition of Across The Pond I revisit a topic I spoke about last month where I predicted that both the Edmonton Oilers and Toronto Maple Leafs would both improve this season but only slightly.

Tonight the 2015 NHL Draft first overall pick Connor McDavid and the Edmonton Oilers take on the 2016 NHL Draft first overall pick Auston Matthews and the Toronto Maple Leafs face off for the first of two meetings between the sides this season.

Both teams have vastly different experiences early in the 2016-17 season, watch below as I talk about tonight’s meeting at the season ahead.

I hope you enjoyed this latest video, more written content is coming (once this goes up I will be starting a new article).

With the NHL season drawing ever closer, it’s the perfect time to make bold statements that you’ll regret come the season end in April.

So in true bold statement spirit, here are the rookies I think you should know about going into the season.

The twist though, I will not talk about Auston Matthews (Toronto Maple Leafs) or Patrik Laine (Winnipeg Jets) because that would just be an easy way to use the word count that I don’t actually have, but it’d also waste your time because i’m sure you know exactly what to expect from these two.

As well as excluding Matthews and Laine, I’ll also exclude guys like Matt Murray (for obvious reasons) and William Nylander (22 games already in the NHL) just to focus on newer guys to the league.

The Edmonton Oilers have just named 19-year old generational talent Connor McDavid as their 15th captain in team history.

McDavid now joins greats like Wayne Gretzky and Mark Messier while also being the youngest ever permanent captain in league history at 19-years and 266 days, beating Gabriel Landeskog by 20 days. (Brian Bellows was younger when he was named interim captain of the Minnesota North Stars in 1984).

Check out my latest video where I pretend to know what i’m talking about on this subject.

If you like what I’m doing, like the video, share the video and subscribe to the channel, it’ll really inflate my ego and hopefully mean you get to see content that interests you once in a blue moon.

Now that the Colorado Avalanche have a new coach, they can finally focus on their upcoming season which I think should see them pushing for a playoff berth after a two-year absence from the post-season.

Jared Bednar comes in on a three-year deal to lead the Avs after the sudden resignation of Patrick Roy, Bednar comes in after leading the Lake Erie Monsters to the AHL Calder Cup last year. A career AHLer and ECHLer, 44-year old Bednar is making a big jump by taking his first coaching job in the NHL but the timing must be right. Since hanging up his skates in 2002 he’s been in a coaching role straight away taking an assistant role with the ECHL’s South Carolina Stingrays. After five-years as an assistant he was promoted in 2007 to lead the Stingrays and in his second year in charge he captured the Kelly Cup. After that success he went onto the AHL where he’s been ever since.

The Edmonton Oilers didn’t win the NHL Draft Lottery this year which still surprises me even after the actual draft, but they still got a big win on the first day of this year’s selections.

Toronto and Winnipeg stuck to the script by taking Auston Matthews and Patrik Laine with the first two picks, then the Columbus Blue Jackets stepped up to the podium, and with all cameras pointed on Jesse Puljujärvi’s face, the Blue Jackets announced a different name, Pierre-Luc Dubois’ name to be exact.

Dubois is a high end prospect and at centre (despite only playing half a year at the position) he does address a need, but Puljujärvi was meant to round out a locked in top three, but instead, the Edmonton Oilers get lucky and quickly picked up the Finnish teenager who was named MVP of the 2016 World Juniors.

While there are only four teams left in the NHL playing hockey, the rest are playing golf, I’m going to look at which team is picking where in next month’s draft and tell you who they’re going to pick with almost everything that follows the top three selections being highly inaccurate.

For arguments sake I’ll list the bottom four teams (St. Louis, San Jose, Pittsburgh and Tampa Bay) in order of how they finished in the regular season standings, the team with the lowest points of the four will get back 27 for example and the highest will get pick 30.

I released a mock draft of the first 14 selections after the NHL Draft Lottery a few weeks back so you can check that out as well to see how much my selections have changed.

If you haven’t heard of Auston Matthews then you probably haven’t really followed Ice Hockey properly for the last year, or you just have very little interest (which is why you’ll have closed the web browser before finishing this paragraph.)

Matthews is the consensus number one pick in the 2016 NHL Entry Draft in Buffalo this summer, the 18-year old from Arizona took the unusual route of spending his draft year playing professional hockey rather than US or Canadian Junior, joining ZSC Lions where he registered 46 points in 36 regular season games for the Swiss side, proving his incredible abilities against men already.

So there’s been a lot return about this American centre who’ll likely be wearing an NHL sweater next season for whoever wins the draft lottery, but let’s get to know one of his closest competitors to be the number one selection on June 24th.